gvfsd-obexftp crashes reliably, and taking the many bug reports on launchpad into account, it does so since years. Having used good old obexftp years before I was amazed to see the project still alive, with a change in maintainership and an updating release in the beginning of March 2013.

Browsing files

Browsing the files on your phone is a simple as

obexftp -b bluetooth_device -l folder_to_list

where bluetooth_device is the device ID of your bluetooth device (e.g. your mobile phone). Get the device ID for example from your Bluetooh Settings (Click the Bluetooth symbol in the top right corner of your desktop).

Putting files

However, when trying to copy files to the phone, my endless trials ended always in

The operation failed with return code 96

errors. It took me a while to figure out that the order of command-line arguments to obexftp matters. For putting files, you need to specify the phone’s current directory with the -c option and this one must preceed the -p argument. So while